Show­ing Up – first-look review

There are few cin­e­mat­ic joys that match the arrival of a new film by Kel­ly Reichardt, a direc­tor who, across a career of eight fea­tures and numer­ous shorts, has devel­oped an affect­ing sig­na­ture of move­ment and steadi­ness, soli­tude and com­mu­ni­ty. In her lat­est, Show­ing Up, the Port­land-based film­mak­er brings lev­i­ty and inci­sive­ness to her por­trait of sculp­tor and teacher Lizzy (played by fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tor, the cap­ti­vat­ing Michelle Williams) whose artis­tic prac­tice allows her­self to lean into a life of lone­li­ness and occa­sion­al bitterness.

Lizzy’s sculp­tures are free-flow­ing and ges­tur­al, some­thing she strug­gles to be her­self as the pres­sure of each pass­ing day push­es her shoul­ders down even fur­ther and dark­ens the bags under her eyes. She wan­ders from class­room to class­room look­ing at what oth­er peo­ple are mak­ing – it recalls the Mit­s­ki lyric, ​“I cry at the start of every movie / I guess ​’cause I wish I was mak­ing things too.” She bemoans the lack of hot water in her apart­ment and huffs at the thought of hav­ing to take care of an injured pigeon when she should be mak­ing art.

And yet, she does take care of the pigeon with the exact con­cern and gen­tle touch she applies to her work. The same del­i­cate fin­gers that press togeth­er limbs in clay stroke the bird’s head with ten­der affec­tion. Is it pro­cras­ti­na­tion that Lizzy seeks here, or sim­ply her duty as a cre­ative to nur­ture some­thing? Beyond all the spite and frus­tra­tion that sim­mers on her sur­face, she’s a car­ing soul. As she pre­pares for an exhi­bi­tion of her work, she labours over her cre­ations and is gen­er­ous­ly sup­port­ed by the col­leagues around her includ­ing a bliss­ful André Ben­jamin who plays kiln mas­ter Eric.

Show­ing Up is per­haps Reichardt’s fun­ni­est film to date, clos­est in tone and style to some­thing like Old Joy, her sec­ond fea­ture length, in its can­did sim­plic­i­ty and dry­ly com­ic mat­ter-of-fact­ness. It’s also per­haps the clos­est to being an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal project in her oeu­vre, in the sense that Reichardt is both film­mak­er and teacher with­in a uni­ver­si­ty space and seems astute­ly aware here of the dynam­ic that per­vades such a lifestyle.

She is play­ful with cos­tume – Lizzy sports Crocs for most of the film – and embraces the quin­tes­sen­tial art teacher uni­form for her char­ac­ters who wear loose, earth-toned culottes and over­sized shirts. Her set­ting, too, is a haven: the Ore­gon Col­lege of Art and Craft and sur­round­ing com­mu­ni­ty, which is anoth­er lev­el of Pacif­ic North­west idyl­lic, even by Reichardt’s low-and-lazy standards.

Lizzy’s neu­roses come to a head around her show­case, com­pound­ed by the fact that her frag­ile broth­er Sean (John Mag­a­ro) seems to be hav­ing an episode of men­tal ill health and she still hasn’t man­aged to get land­lord Jo (Hong Chau) to fix her boil­er. Com­pli­ments seem to fly over her head; the arrival of a New York gallery own­er gar­ners lit­tle excite­ment. Lizzy fix­ates on the pigeon, the one sculp­ture that was dam­aged by the kiln and the count­less oth­er things that have in some way hin­dered her progress.

Reichardt’s por­tray­al of the claus­tro­pho­bia of giv­ing your­self to oth­ers and to your work con­stant­ly is del­i­cate and amus­ing, but nev­er flip­pant. Show­ing Up feels like a moment of release for the film­mak­er, a know­ing reflec­tion on past work and artis­tic growth while lean­ing in to all the beau­ti­ful ele­ments of sound, colour and tex­ture that have come to be expect­ed from her work. The air lifts, the pigeon flies away, the con­ver­sa­tion becomes easy. A bal­ance is restored. The artist enjoys the moment of lull before the cre­ative process must, inevitably, start all over again.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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